Friday, April 21, 2017

I’m working on a 200-word roleplaying game. And so are lots of other people!

The 200 Word RPG Challenge is a pretty casual contest where anyone can submit up to two bite-sized RPGs. Organized by David Schirduan and Marshall Miller, the contest encourages creativity and judges only content, not formatting. Submissions must be in plain text, with no art or fancy layout involved.

The contest website contains all the entries from the past twoyears, and you can already start reading the submissions that have come in for this year.

Prizes for the three winners include free graphic design, artwork, and layout for the winning RPGs; mentions on two gaming podcasts, inclusion in a gaming fanzine; and copies of a few RPGs. And two of the judges are Jef and Jon, the hosts of one of my favorite gaming podcasts: System Mastery!

The submission period is open now and runs through this weekend (closing at the end of April 23).

Wish me luck on my submission (or, if I’m being optimistic, submissions). It might be difficult, fitting something that could be called an RPG into the exact length of this post.

Friday, April 7, 2017

Back in January, prolific gaming blogger (and pal of mine) James Walls vented on Facebook about feeling the need to do something positive to counteract the bad feelings generated by the recent attempted Muslim ban. And, being a hard-core tabletop gamer, he wondered if that positive activity could be something game-related. Some of us other like-minded gamers felt the same way, and together we started a group we call Lawful Good Gaming.

Here’s James’s introduction to the group:

There is some good in this world and it's worth fighting for...

The world had given us about as much as we could take. So we decided to use the talents and skills cultivated in our tabletop gaming hobby to help make our world just a little bit better. So we formed LAWFUL GOOD GAMING.

Lawful Good Gaming coordinates, hosts, and participates in tabletop gaming events (both online and in person) to help raise money for progressive charities, organizations, and causes. Make no mistake... to paraphrase a great Browncoat, “We aim to misbehave."

If this sounds like your kind of adventure, come join us! We’re just getting started, and your voice will most certainly be heard.

The group’s current home is the Lawful Good Gaming Facebook group, until we get our website up and running. The Facebook group is public; only members can post, but we’re happy to add all gamers who want to join the fight.

So far, members of the group have run three online RPG one-shots to raise money for our selected charities. We ask players to make a donation to one of the charities before the game and send the GM some form of proof-of-donation. (We don’t handle money ourselves.)

Our first three games were Gods of the Fall, The Strange, and Night’s Black Agents. In those three events, we raised over $700. I think that’s a great start!

We have five more events scheduled at the moment, and more on the way.